We went back to them apologetically telling them “hey, we’ve built something” but they never replied. Too slow, clearly.
Companies drop the ball on all kinds of stuff all the time. With MealSquares, we’ve observed that it’s difficult to get companies to reply to email inquiries about buying their products! See The Moby Dick theory of big companies. There’s an entire science to selling to big companies which I don’t know much about. This book might be a good place to start. Often in sales you talk about a sales funnel with leads, prospects, etc.--you try to gather as many leads as possible and then minimize the amount of dropoff at each stage (not 100% sure I’m using the correct terminology).
Hardcore techies will probably be thinking I should have just dropped the PhD.
My hardcore techie take on your post is: Now you know why Silicon Valley is obnoxiously elitist when it comes to hiring software developers :) I wouldn’t have told you to drop the PhD; I would have told you to start programming as a hobby in your spare time, and if you were having fun & it seemed like something you were good at it, perhaps start a company (or maybe get a job as a developer for a while first—nothing like getting paid to level up your skills). As a nontechnical person, you were lucky to get technical people to work with you on a project for free, and you were taking a gamble on their skills and commitment. It’s not at all surprising that the gamble didn’t pay off.
Ending with a whimper not a bang seems to be a common outcome when I talk to other people who have started companies. Sometimes I hear about someone’s project and I’m like “wow that sounds really exciting” and they’re like “yeah but I’ve been working on it so long that it’s no longer exciting to me”. (Actually, that’s about how I feel about your project too—it sounds like a good idea, although I’m not sure it would have been big outside of the quantified self market.) So it might be worthwhile to figure out exactly when it is/isn’t acceptable to quit in advance before you start a new project. You want a way to differentiate temporary demoralization that should be pushed through from indicators that the project is legitimately not worth pursuing.
Companies drop the ball on all kinds of stuff all the time. With MealSquares, we’ve observed that it’s difficult to get companies to reply to email inquiries about buying their products! See The Moby Dick theory of big companies. There’s an entire science to selling to big companies which I don’t know much about. This book might be a good place to start. Often in sales you talk about a sales funnel with leads, prospects, etc.--you try to gather as many leads as possible and then minimize the amount of dropoff at each stage (not 100% sure I’m using the correct terminology).
My hardcore techie take on your post is: Now you know why Silicon Valley is obnoxiously elitist when it comes to hiring software developers :) I wouldn’t have told you to drop the PhD; I would have told you to start programming as a hobby in your spare time, and if you were having fun & it seemed like something you were good at it, perhaps start a company (or maybe get a job as a developer for a while first—nothing like getting paid to level up your skills). As a nontechnical person, you were lucky to get technical people to work with you on a project for free, and you were taking a gamble on their skills and commitment. It’s not at all surprising that the gamble didn’t pay off.
Ending with a whimper not a bang seems to be a common outcome when I talk to other people who have started companies. Sometimes I hear about someone’s project and I’m like “wow that sounds really exciting” and they’re like “yeah but I’ve been working on it so long that it’s no longer exciting to me”. (Actually, that’s about how I feel about your project too—it sounds like a good idea, although I’m not sure it would have been big outside of the quantified self market.) So it might be worthwhile to figure out exactly when it is/isn’t acceptable to quit in advance before you start a new project. You want a way to differentiate temporary demoralization that should be pushed through from indicators that the project is legitimately not worth pursuing.